Getting to know your customersDo you know who your prospects and customers are? Are they male or female? How much to they earn? How old are they? What other interests do they have?

Whether you are just starting out and evaluating different niches or already up and running with your web-business these are crucial questions to ask.

Getting to know your prospects and customers:

In this article I’m going to share with you 2 free online tools that you can use to find answers to all of these questions and more.

1. Quantcast.com

Quantcast is an excellent service that can tell you so much about the audience for a particular online marketplace. To get started with it follow these simple steps:

1. Go to Google and search on a broad term for the niche that you’d like to investigate. For example, if you are in the healthy eating niche then choose a broader search term like, “weight loss”.

2. Pick the top website from the Google results, go to QuantCast.com and type this web address into the search bar.

3. If Quantcast doesn’t display any results (which does happen sometimes!) then simply go back to Google and choose the next website in the results. Alternatively, try a different search term: “dieting tips” instead of “weight loss” for example.

If you’d like to see a free video of me demonstrating how to do this then please click here.

By using the 3 steps above you can find out so much useful information about virtually any online niche.

For our weight loss example above I discovered that 60% of the audience are female (40% male), around two thirds have no kids and people who visit the website I selected from Google have a wide range of education and income.

Picking another niche that I’ve been personally involved in (stock trading), Quantcast tells us that most of our potential prospects and customers are male, are over the age of 50 and earn over $100,000 per year.

This information can really help you target your marketing to increase its appeal! Even small things like adding a picture to your website of a person who closely matches the demographic of your audience can make a huge difference. But also keep in mind what you have learnt from Quantcast when you write blog posts and send emails to your subscribers.

2. Wordtracker Questions Tool

This is another great free tool that you can use to find out what questions people are asking in most online marketplaces.

There’s no need to go to Google with this one, just go straight to the Wordtracker tool (click here) and type in your keyword. Sometimes, you’ll need to play around with the keywords you use in order to find the best results but this is a nice way to focus in on what people actually want to know, providing you with great ideas for blog posts, products, lead magnets and specific areas of interest.

When I typed in Gardening, I found out the most popular question people were asking is, “How to start indoor vegetable gardening”! Something I would have never thought of without using the Wordtracker tool!

Please note: The Wordtracker tool will ask you to sign up after your first search. If you wish to sign up then of course you can do so but if not then all you need to do is empty the cache in your browser in order to use the tool again. In Internet Explorer you can do this by clicking on the gear icon at the top right, selecting “Internet Options” and clicking on “Delete” under the “Browsing history” section. Do this and you’ll be good to go again for another search!